Working hard, but flexibly

Apr 26th 2013, 12:01 by J.L.H.D. | ATLANTA

WHEN Marissa Mayer, pictured, chief executive of Yahoo, cancelled all telecommuting at the firm’s Silicon Valley office back in February, the move was criticised (by this newspaper, among others) as less than helpful to female employees. Flexible scheduling and working-from-home, it is often argued, give women more latitude to work while still devoting time to their families. (Your correspondent is writing this in the afternoon, having spent most of the morning tending to a 3-year-old with a fever and a 19-month-old without.)

Kristina Bourne and Pamela Forman, a pair of researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, decided to cast a closer eye on flexible work in practice, to see if a group of working women setting their own schedules could achieve the mythical “work-life balance”. Their results, forthcoming in the Journal of Management Inquiry, might surprise Ms Mayer.

Ms Bourne approached the question as an ethnographer would: she chose ten female entrepreneurs, interviewed them at length, and spent time observing their workdays, which were sometimes 12 or 14 hours at a stretch. Six of the ten worked from home; all were able to set their own diaries. Punishing schedules turned out to be the norm rather than the exception, although the entrepreneurs employed strategies to make the work feel less of a grind on weekends or evenings. They would, for example, delegate certain tasks as easy enough to be done while watching television, or save trade magazines for bedtime reading. One emphasised her “off-time” not by actually stopping work, as she continued to file and answer emails, but by pouring herself a glass of wine.

Nearly all, meanwhile, spoke of feeling guilty about dedicating time to anything but work. This leads the authors to conclude that flexible scheduling failed to help with the work-life balance problem. “Flexibility is only an advantage if it sometimes enables a person to sacrifice work activities to non-work obligations,” they argue. “When work becomes the fulcrum around which lives are organised, family, home, leisure, and all else are subordinated.”

There is a certain condescension in the article, an air of pity for these women who, the authors say, are talking themselves into enjoyment of their work without realising how much they are actually working. Missing, however, is evidence that the subjects are actually dissatisfied: they speak of guilt and stress, but also pride and satisfaction in their work. Flexible schedules may end up promoting long hours, but that might still be tolerable if the work is fulfilling.